Loving Susie (20 page)

How I’d suffered.
‘Right.’

‘Yes. I had my little boy, Brian, two years to the day after you were born. Isn’t that funny? To the day.’

‘I have a brother?’

‘He’s a lovely boy, Brian. Not a boy any longer, of course. He’s married. He’s got two children. Teenagers now, Cheryl and Antony. Ant, he likes to be called.’

‘Have you got any photographs?’

Joyce leans down and lifts her handbag from its position near her feet. ‘I brought them specially. Here.’

A family photograph. A man, slightly balding, his face pleasant, a little rounded. The woman pretty, a brunette, petite and tidy. Two children, nice looking, bright kids.

This is my brother. These are my niece and nephew, Cheryl and Ant.

‘I have another daughter, too, Sharon. She lives in New Zealand now. Here.’ Another photograph, another family. ‘That’s Alan, her husband, and Stacey, her little girl. She’s eight in a few weeks time. Of course, we don’t get to see them so often, with them being so far away.’

And a sister. It’s too much to assimilate.

‘Brian, he’s local. He stays in Stirling, to be near me. He’s really kind.’ Her back straightens, she is glowing with pride. ‘After my Eric died, he said he’d be sure to take care of his Mum, because Sharon had already gone off. She was always an adventurer, that one, but Brian runs a big business, you know, he’s done really well for himself. Of course, he worked hard, he always was ambitious.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘I never really understand it myself, but they do design work. On computers, he tells me. Internet stuff. Magazines. That kind of thing.’

In the battered, overwhelmed area of her head that Susie normally likes to think of as a brain, something resonates. ‘A design company? In Stirling? It’s not called CommX, is it, by any chance?’

Joyce beams. ‘That’s it. Yes. CommX. Do you know it?’

Chapter Twenty-three

Family conferences are not in the Wallace tradition, but it’s time, Susie thinks as she drives home that evening, to tell her family about their new relatives. Archie too, if she can drag him out of the studio.

‘Sunday,’ she says to Mannie on the phone. ‘No excuses, I want you here for lunch.’

‘Sunday lunch,’ she tells Jon. ‘I don’t care how tired you are. You can tell us all about your first week at work.’

‘Lunch is at one on Sunday. The children are coming. Please be there,’ she writes on a note for Archie. She shoves this under the door of the studio.

The cottage is silent when she rises at eight. The calendar has tipped into June and the sun has demurely followed its prompting, obligingly turning up its thermostat so that the kitchen, when she descends for her habitual cup of tea, is deliciously cosy. She opens the back door and allows the light to flood over the stone slabs of the floor.

One day in a week to call my own.

It’s a fatal thought, because just as she sinks onto the bench in the courtyard to enjoy the peace, the phone rings.

‘Radio Scotland here, Mrs Wallace,’ says a cheerful voice. ‘We understand that the Education Minister is under pressure to resign – are you willing to talk to us?’

It’s news to her. She gives a holding response while she tracks down Maureen Armstrong and fills herself in on the background. Her own constant criticism of the cuts in funding for school arts projects have not, Mo tells her sternly, helped the case and she should not, repeat not, agree to an interview.

She calls the station back. ‘I’ll talk to you,’ she says, knowing it’s suicide, but Party loyalty or not, she is determined to remain true to her cause. The Arts must come first. And children. Children are the future and their hearts and souls must be nourished and fed – and how is that going to happen on a diet of literacy and numeracy targets?

It’s a busy morning and consequently when Mannie drives up the gravel drive at midday, her work in the kitchen isn’t nearly done. So it’s, ‘Will you peel the spuds, love?’ and ‘Could you possibly set the table, darling?’ – knowing the men won’t turn up till lunch is steaming on their plates  – and there’s no time for talking.

Jon is first to show, his hair rumpled with sleep and his eyes still bleary. Mannie laughs. ‘What a sight,’ she teases. ‘Homo laboro. Working man at his worst.’

‘Piss off,’ Jonno says, still grumpy with tiredness, but he doesn’t say it unkindly.

Archie’s shadow falls across the floor. ‘Where will I put these?’

He’s standing in the doorway, the brightness of the sun behind his head making his silvery hair into a kind of halo. His arms are full of flowers –a gesture that touches her heart. He has been picking these for ages, he must have been, because some of the flowers grow not in the garden but deep in the nearby wood, where the small loch spills onto the heather, checked only by some rough, moss-strewn boulders.

‘How lovely. Thank you Archie. Mannie, could you put them in a vase? Archie, open some wine will you please? Jonathan, the roast is ready to take through, your father will carve.’

It’s almost like the old days. Jon is more or less cheerful, Mannie is a blur of motion and energy, Archie is stolid and quiet, but there.

‘So, Mum. What’s this all about, huh?’ Jon says as he lays down his spoon and fork. ‘Great crumble, by the way.’

‘Thank you, Jonathan.’

She settles back in her chair and looks round her family.

‘I want,’ she says, ‘to tell you about your cousins.’

It isn’t, as it turns out, the cousins that have the real impact on her audience. Susie thought she had it all planned, but it’s not at all straightforward. She’d imagined that unveiling the identity of her true father would be the highlight, but in the event, there’s only mild interest in that.

‘Jimmy Scirocco?’ Jonno snorts. ‘That’ll make the news.’

‘Christ,’ says Mannie,’ That explains a lot.’

Archie says nothing, merely folds his arms and slumps a little further down in his seat. She can’t read him. This disconcerts her, because in all the years they have been together, she has never found Archie difficult to fathom.

‘What do you mean, Mannie?’ she asks her daughter.

‘Well. You know. The acting. The hair. All that energy. I guess I’ve got a bit of that, too,’ she adds, realising.

Susie says, ‘He never knew about me.’ She becomes unexpectedly emotional at this point and is forced to swallow back tears, although no-one seems to notice. ‘Joyce married an old school mate, within a year.’

Mannie observes, ‘She can’t have been that much in love with him then.’

‘And she had another child, quite quickly. He was born two years to the day after me.’

Jon, never renowned for his sensitivity, says, ‘Really? That’d cheer her up.’

‘What about poor old Mum?’ Mannie says reproachfully. ‘Given away, handed over to heaven knows what fate.’

‘But Mum did all right,’ Jon protests. ‘She did really well, in fact.’

‘I did all right,’ Susie acknowledges. ‘Joyce had a daughter a few years later. She lives in New Zealand now, apparently. I’ve got photographs.’ She stands up and goes to her small desk, lifts out a folder. ‘Here.’

She hands a photograph of Sharon to Mannie, who scrutinises it. ‘She’s got a kid. She’s what, eight or nine?’

‘Almost eight.’

‘They look nice.’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the boy?’ Mannie asks. ‘Did he move away too?’

‘No, actually, he still lives locally, in Stirling.’ Susie pauses. This will be a surprise for Jon, she knows. She draws out the next photograph. ‘In fact, you might recognise him.’ She turns it over. ‘His name’s Brian Henderson.’

Jonathan’s eyes grow round. He picks up the photograph and stares at it intently. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says weightily.

‘Let me see,’ Mannie says, her voice taut. She snatches the photograph from him and Susie watches in astonishment as all the blood drains from her face and her hands begin to tremble. The photograph falls to the table and slides across the glossy surface, coming to rest against the stem of Archie’s wine glass.

‘No!’ Mannie cries, in a voice Susie barely recognises. It sounds more like the cry of a beast in agony than anything human. ‘No! It can’t be!’

‘What?’ Archie, she notices, has roused himself from his passivity and is sitting bolt upright, concern writ large on his face. ‘What is it, Treasure?’ he asks gently, and tries to take hold of one of Mannie’s hands.

She pulls it away violently and stands up. Her chair clatters to the floor, its back hitting the flagstones with a crash. Mannie spins on her heel and turns to the kitchen, running to the sink, where she is noisily and violently sick.

Susie is appalled. ‘What’s wrong? What is it?’

Jon stands too, his face almost as white as Mannie’s. ‘The photograph,’ he says. ‘It’s Brian Henderson, my boss.’

‘Yes,’ Susie says puzzled. ‘I know that. I thought it was quite funny, you ending up there just as we discover we’re related.’

‘That’s the problem,’ Jon says. ‘He’s your brother, isn’t he? Which makes him Mannie’s uncle.’

Susie nods.

‘Brian Henderson is the man that Mannie’s obsessed with. Mum – she’s in love with her uncle.’

The retching in the kitchen turns into a wail.

Susie’s response is immediate and irrational.

‘This is your fault, Archie,’ she says, tartly, all the anguish of the past months rolling into one bitter accusation. ‘If you’d just been honest with me, we’d have known about my history and discovered my birth family years ago. None of this would have happened and poor Mannie wouldn’t be in this mess.’

The moment the words are out of her mouth she regrets them, but it’s too late. Archie is on his feet, his lips pursed tight against the possibility of making any retort. He marches towards the door.

‘Wait! Archie!’

He halts, but doesn’t turn to look at her. Then, very deliberately, he continues walking.

Archie whistles for Prince and opens the back of the old Land Rover so that the dog can jump in. He has to get away from here, he has no idea where to, anywhere will do. He is appalled and he’s worried, but most of all, he is furious – because after all, who is Susie Wallace to talk of secrets? His mind catapults back across the years, to how close he came to losing her.

Calgary Bay is ten weeks into filming and Archie has known from the start that she has met someone. Susie’s honesty can be a painful thing, but her dishonesty is excruciating. He hears it first in the forced levity of her voice, detects it in the uncharacteristic half-heartedness of her protestations of affection then realises, with debilitating numbness, that there is one person she has completely omitted to talk about: her co-star, Maitland Forbes.

He visits Mull one weekend, when they’re shooting on location, and his suspicions are confirmed. There’s an unnatural tension between Susie and Maitland. She avoids his eye and Maitland is excruciatingly jovial. The crew exudes uneasiness in Archie’s presence and he knows that they know, or at least that they have guessed. Each signal is small by itself, together they provide him with a devastating dossier. He’s certain that his instincts are sound.

He has to return to Glasgow, where he is teaching in a secondary school. The autumn term has just commenced, so he’s no longer free to travel to Mull, to gauge whether things are the same, he has to agonise alone. He and Susie have been married for just one year and he’s still hopelessly, tormentedly in love with her. He wonders, daily, why this glorious, bewitching woman chose him when there were so many more tempting suitors.

With his suspicions come a deepening loss of self esteem and he struggles to get through the days, his mind a quagmire of questions. How should he deal with this? Should he abandon everything and cross to Mull for a confrontation? If he forces the issue and she chooses him, will she always resent his actions and regret her decision – and what will his marriage be worth then? If she doesn’t, then he will have lost her, for ever.

In the end, he knows in his heart that he has to leave it to Susie to make her choice. He says nothing, just waits in agony.

Susie comes back to him the day the filming ends and tells him that she adores him. She lavishes affection on him as if she needs to make atonement. She buys him a guitar he has pined for and declares her love incessantly. Perhaps such things could be taken as cover for wrongdoing, but there are no signs of secrecy or dishonesty, no furtive phone calls or letters hurriedly tucked away and Archie gradually becomes secure in the knowledge that whatever she felt for Maitland has been put aside and that Susie has made her decision. It’s over.

Eight weeks later, she announces that she is pregnant.

At the crossroads, Archie pauses. Straight on into Hailesbank, left towards Edinburgh or right, deeper into the countryside? It isn’t so much a choice as an instinct; he turns right, the Land Rover taking him towards the farm where Sandie Alexander lives with her partner, Jim Gibson. He can drive past of course, but ten minutes later he finds himself pulling into their yard and fervently hoping she’s there and willing to talk.

‘Afternoon, Archie.’

It’s Jim who appears at the door of the farmhouse, his florid face all friendliness. When Sandie moved in with the big, gentle widower five years ago, it was the talk of the neighbourhood and viewed as the most unlikely match imaginable, but there’s something in the counterpoint of the two personalities that works perfectly.

‘You for a cuppa? Sandie’s in the kitchen.’

‘Got a moment, Jim, have you? I’m not intruding?’

‘Sure, sure. Good to see you. Want to take the dog in with you?’

He lets Prince out of the back and finds Sandie stacking the dishwasher. The quiet domesticity of the scene is disturbingly at odds with the Sandie he knows, the rock queen with the sultry voice who can whip an audience of thousands into a frenzy. 

‘Hi. Jim’s promised me tea.’

Sandie’s pale face breaks into a broad grin. ‘Just tea? He’s fucking mean. I’ll get him trained one day.’

Jim, who has followed him in, moves up behind his wife and folds her in an embrace of surprising tenderness for such a big man. ‘I’m the one who should do the training. Language lessons.’ He beams at Archie. ‘It’s no use. I’ve given up. Listen, you two will have things to talk about and I need to get up to the top field to take a look at a sheep I’m worried about.’

‘Sure? I’m not driving you out?’

‘Not at all, not a bit of it.’

Sandie sets out two mugs. ‘Really tea, Archie? Or something stronger?’ She looks at him speculatively.

For all her edgy appearance, Sandie is astonishingly intuitive, but he says, with the ghost of a smile, ‘Tea’s fine. I’m driving.’

‘Well.’ She pours. ‘Is it the album?’

Prince flops comfortably at his feet and closes his eyes and Archie feels the comfort of his presence. He takes a moment or two to respond to Sandie’s question, and when he does, it’s with one of his own. ‘You and Jim – you’re sound, the two of you?’

Sandie picks up a packet of cigarettes and pulls one out. ‘So you’ve had a row with Susie?’

Archie doesn’t normally take sugar in his tea, but he picks up a teaspoon and loads it with a small, glistening mound. ‘We’ve been married thirty years, you know.’

‘Fuck me. I was ten back then.’

‘I used to see her at the college, so beautiful, always surrounded by admirers, absolutely unattainable. I never thought I’d be the lucky sod who’d land her, the biggest catch of the decade.’

‘She’s the fucking lucky one, Archie,’ Sandie says softly, putting the cigarette to her lips and inhaling deeply.

He goes on as if he hasn’t heard her. ‘She was always a passionate person. Always had her causes. I think it was the passion that made her such a great actress. When Susie acts, she becomes that person. She can make you empathise with the character so much that each agony is your agony.’

He has been tipping the sugar into his tea grain by grain. Now he watches as the last of it slides off the spoon, then he dips it back into the bowl and reloads it.

‘She could have been a much bigger star, you know. She could have been as big a name as—’ he forces himself to say the name, ‘—Maitland Forbes. Bigger. But when the children came along, she started turning down the parts that would have taken her away from us – the big films, Hollywood.’